I have been asked to mentor Ahtziri, a 17-year-old high school senior, through the process of writing a novel for her A.P. English class. I am not a novelist, but I am a poet, and I direct a nonprofit—the Inlandia Institute—whose mission is to support literary activity, in all of its forms, throughout inland Southern California, aka the Inland Empire or I.E. The Inland Empire has been in the news a lot lately, with the most recent mass shooting and largest terror attack on U.S. soil since September 11 taking place here. But we are far more than a news headline.

Until the recent shootings in San Bernardino, the Inland Empire was largely unknown, and until the Inlandia Institute was formed, it lacked a cohesive literary identity, unlike Los Angeles or other major metropolitan areas, despite its long history of literary excellence. I was drawn to Inlandia because its mission so closely meshes with my own priorities: as a writer who calls this place home, as a mother who wants to see more opportunities for young people to engage their creativity, and as a locavore reader who wants to read and support local writers. I want more people to know and understand this region that I love, and the best way I know to do that is by seeing it through the eyes of the people who live here.

Which is why I’ve agreed to mentor Ahtziri. And why the Inlandia Institute wants to build community by supporting creative literacy—fostering creative thinking and problem solving through narrative and storytelling—throughout inland Southern California.

Like any other group, a community of readers and writers doesn’t spring up overnight; it grows gradually over the decades as people with a similar mindset find one another and begin to lay a foundation. But sometimes a catalyst comes along, and suddenly there is momentum. In the case of Inlandia, that catalyst was the publication of an anthology that recognized the depth and breadth of the literary writing by and about this region: Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California’s Empire, which Heyday published in 2006.

Inlandia stacks greats such as Joan Didion and John Steinbeck and Norman Mailer alongside local jewels like novelist Susan Straight, who sets many of her stories in the fictional Rio Seco, a doppelgänger of Riverside; American Book Award winner Juan Delgado, whose poems evoke and celebrate the lives of the Mexican-American residents of San Bernardino; and Gordon Johnson, a Native American newspaper columnist for Riverside’s Press-Enterprise who writes with frank humor and grace about life on the reservation. The anthology elevated the lives of the people here, and put the Inland Empire, quite literally, on the “map”—now anyone around the country can pick up this book and gain an understanding of what it’s like to live here, and what the region is like.

The nonprofit Inlandia began as a collaboration of the Riverside Public Library and Heyday to create cultural and literary events that celebrate the region’s writers and offer creative literary enrichment opportunities for people of all ages. Early projects included an ongoing series of writing workshops, programs in the schools, workshops for seniors on writing their life story, seminars on the “Business of Being a Writer,” and book readings and signings. By 2009, the program was so successful that it became an independent organization. A mission statement was drawn up to clearly define its footprint as the entire inland region (including both Riverside and San Bernardino counties and parts of neighboring Imperial and Inyo counties), and to focus on five core programs: adult creative literacy, publications, public literary events, children’s creative literacy, and a literary laureate program.

That was the year I got involved with Inlandia. I was invited to present my work for an Inlandia author series at the library downtown, where I met Marion Mitchell-Wilson, the nonprofit’s first executive director. Marion thought my writing, publishing, and literary event experience would be a good fit for Inlandia. Soon she created a part-time coordinator position for me, which expanded over time, from founding a literary journal and running events to facilitating book publication, grant writing, and managing daily operations. When Marion was diagnosed with breast cancer, she asked if I would keep everything running until she got better. I couldn’t say no.

Marion underwent treatment, came back, found the cancer had returned, and left again; she came back one last time before learning that the breast cancer was back yet again and had metastasized to her bones, liver, and brain. Within a matter of months, she had succumbed. But before she died, she called some of the people involved with Inlandia into her home and made a dramatic request: She wanted us to found an endowment in her name to ensure the continuity of the organization for decades to come. We raised $100,000 in six weeks.

Building a literary community is not just about reading and writing; like any community, it is only as good as its people. People tend to unite in celebration of a cause they feel passionate about. That’s what I believe happened with the endowment.

The people are also the reason I keep working with Inlandia. Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of collaborating with UC Riverside professor and current U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera (who coined the term “Inlandia” in the first place) on a variety of projects, including a guerrilla-style poetry reading on the downtown Riverside pedestrian mall during the lunch hour, and an event at the Smiley Library in Redlands to collect poems for his unity poem.

Juan Felipe Herrera, now U.S. poet laureate, conducts a choir during the Unity Fiesta at UC Riverside.

A few lines of poetry contributed to Juan Felipe Herrera’s collaborative project, “The Most Incredible and Biggest and Most Amazing Poem on Unity in the World.”

Inlandia serves a vast swath of inland cities, from the Salton Sea to Temecula, from Wrightwood to Mecca. I am very attached to this region, where I’ve spent the better part of my adult life, even after living in places where the arts have deeper roots. But what the region lacks in deep roots it makes up for in diversity—both ethnic and socioeconomic—and its residents have a great appreciation for that. We are not San Francisco or Los Angeles, but we, too, have world-class museums and cultural events and spacious, beautiful libraries. And we have pride.

As I write this, I am surrounded by poems submitted to our “Poetry Box” during Riverside’s Long Night of Arts and Innovation, an event held downtown and sponsored by the city of Riverside every two years. The event brings together innovators in technology alongside arts and cultural organizations to showcase what Riverside has to offer. (Riverside’s tagline is the “City of Arts and Innovation.”) The Poetry Box was a space for people to play with words—to cut up and rearrange them into poetry on a large felt board, to add to a collaborative poem in a single notebook, or just to write with pens on blank paper. It was surprising to see how many people stopped, sat down, put pen to paper, and wrote a poem, some for the first time. The Poetry Box got to the core of what Inlandia is all about—building community, one word at a time.

I love who we are, we Inlandians—and I revel in all of the places we’ve come from or have yet to go. I think of Ahtziri—wonder whether or not she will finish her novel. But you know what? The finishing doesn’t matter. It’s the starting that counts, and I don’t just want to see how the story ends. I want to see where it takes her.

The post Can Books Build Community? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Art-making also works when a group of specialized artists—or even artists of different mediums—come together. We re-learned this important principle last year when we collaborated with other dancers for a performance at the Afterimage Gallery in Riverside. Our piece was part of an exhibition called “Hanging Out” that featured music, spoken word, and fine art as well as dance.

“On the Line” is an ongoing project by scholar and artist Susan Ossman that began with a painting she created from seeing laundry on a clothesline in Morocco. Last winter, in conjunction with the project, Ossman taught a class at UC Riverside and curated a culminating exhibition—“Hanging Out.” Students in the class, along with professional artists from a range of disciplines, created work to reflect on the vanishing practice of hanging clothes on the line.

We joined as representatives of Riverside’s dance community. We were both particularly interested in meeting after viewing each other’s choreography and hearing about each other’s projects. “Hanging Out” became the perfect way to work together. Ossman’s vision for the exhibition was collaborative from beginning to end, in large and small ways. We took that collaboration as our operating principle, too. Often, multiple perspectives make these kinds of projects challenging, but our experience was smooth. We had a central theme, out of which many ideas sprouted to be shaped into a whole.

We invited dancers from the community whom we had worked with before or were interested in working with. Six responded: Samantha Carlson, Rebekah Johnson, Erica Johnson, Lindsey Lester, Valerie Mendez, and Tracy Tom-Hoon. In our current economy, professional dancers often cobble together an assortment of jobs or work full-time while squeezing dance in. The dancer who manages to support herself merely through dance is quickly becoming extinct. The eight of us work at a variety of jobs besides performing, ranging from a post at Costco to teaching at a local studio. Yet we were able to find times to rehearse together.

Another challenge for independent dance artists is finding rehearsal space to work. When they finish up university training and make their way into the “real world,” there’s a large gulf for dancers to cross if they want to continue in dance. Where can these artists develop their craft if they cannot afford to train at a studio? Riverside has overcome some obstacles to become a dance hub—a base where multiple colleges, dance studios, and lovers of dance come together.

We were fortunate to have temporary access to space at the Culver Center of the Arts to create the “Hanging Out” piece. As we began our work, we were also grateful for the freedom offered by Ossman. She let us think about how to occupy a small gallery and interact with art.

The notion of “airing out our laundry”—the material that hugs and protects the body in an intimate way—formed the heart of our piece. We wanted to think about the facets of our lives that we decide to reveal to others, as well as those we prefer to keep hidden.

We wondered if the desire to air out fragile and intimate moments of our lives changed over time. So we interviewed people at a range of ages to learn about the parts of their lives they choose to expose. To begin the process, we recorded the voices of several women at The Grove, a senior living facility in Riverside, inviting them to share something private that they might tell a close friend only. This question seemed to call up a flurry of fond memories, and broadened our collaboration out into the community.

Simultaneously, Dhiren Panikker, a co-collaborator and musician, was also conducting interviews along with others in Ossman’s class. Panikker layered the interviews over each other and spliced them with electronic music. The result was a score in which slivers of voices were sometimes distinct, sometimes covered by other sounds. We worked to develop movement scores that complemented these shared sound moments and used what we had learned in our investigations. We asked dancers: “Is there a secret that you would only share with a close friend?” This question inspired individual solos that opened the piece. One of the dancers even shared the hidden memory behind her movement—“a secret love affair in an outdoor garden.”

In a different rehearsal, dancers chose tiny spaces in the studio—a window frame, a corner marked off by a chair, a door jamb—and developed movement within the enclosure. Dancers then came into the larger studio but kept the same “tiny space” feeling. Each dancer approached the task with interest and whimsy: Lindsey investigated low-level moments she had created behind an open closet door; Valerie choreographed a phrase in response to dancing against a beam between windows. Dancers also paired off and alternately performed their tiny dances. The idea was for each dancer to support or constrict the movement of her partner by using contact. One could move, maneuver, or guide her partner for a moment or two and then the roles would switch.

The notion of a single “genius” artist holds strong in our society. Yet when many artists come together they can create something larger, and possibly more complex, than a solo artist might. What if we opened up our projects to groups of interested people more often? Art could be less of a struggle and more of a liberation.

This spring our work will continue to unfold. Ossman has received more funding for “On the Line” and the project will be exhibited soon at our public library. We will bring new dancers to the work we will develop—on outdoor stages shaped by visual artists in library gardens and parking lots in the Arlanza, La Sierra, and Casa Blanca neighborhoods. The project continues to demonstrate the emergence of Riverside as a space for innovation in the arts and an environment where dance can thrive.

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That was the conclusion of a panel of local arts and civic leaders at a “Living the Arts” event co-presented by the James Irvine Foundation at the new San Bernardino Garcia Center for the Arts, which opened in an old water district building just three days ago. The new venue has inspired a sense of possibility about the city’s arts scene that shaped the conversation.

San Bernardino Sun reporter Michel Nolan, the event moderator, said the city is experiencing a “creative revival.” Panelists said that revival includes more cooperation between arts groups, schools, and artists, a stronger city arts commission, and greater participation in arts projects by young people (especially via a group called Generation Now). It’s also reflected in the work of photographer Tom McGovern to capture San Bernardino and its people, which has been displayed in local storefronts, some of them abandoned.

San Bernardino’s city government is still in bankruptcy and the city has been the subject of recent L.A. Times coverage about its poverty. But the event was rich in conversation about specific ideas for boosting San Bernardino and its arts.

Ernie Garcia, a retired education school dean at California State University San Bernardino and a leader in creating the new arts center, praised the city’s progress, but said there was much more work to do.

He said the city’s fine arts commission requires greater clarity in its accounts and how it spends money. He also said San Bernardino needs to create opportunities so the creative people who attend its schools and universities can make a living in the arts here.

And, to applause from an appreciative audience that filled the room, Garcia suggested that local investors could acquire dilapidated buildings between the original McDonald’s (a landmark and tourist draw) and the new arts center, and turn those buildings over to local artists—creating an arts corridor of sorts. He said that Paducah, Kentucky, had done something similar with its LowerTown Arts District. And he suggested capitalizing on San Bernardino’s base of skilled woodworkers—noting that the arts center’s beautiful ceiling wood beams had been made locally—to develop new woodworking art forms that could define the city artistically.

But those were just a few of his ideas. “We need you,” he added. “We need your ideas.”

Valerie Peister, the director of community engagement for the Redlands Community Music Association, who previously worked for the San Bernardino Symphony, said that San Bernardino should prioritize access to the arts, as the symphony has done in the past through ticket scholarships and its Mosaico Arts and Music Festival.

Peister said the Mosaico festival had been successful in part because its organizers held community conversations to gather ideas and collaborated broadly across arts fields. “The groups that were part of the conversations then became part of the events,” she said.

In response to a question from Nolan about arts efforts in other cities worth emulating, she suggested that San Bernardino offer outdoor concerts and performances with no admission charges, as in nearby communities like Redlands and Fontana. “There’s something about the arts in a community that sparks the human spirit,” she said.

Juan Delgado, a poet who is a professor and interim provost at California State University, San Bernardino, said the city needs to give more recognition to artists and arts-minded people who have kept the arts alive in the city, particularly through murals and street art. He also said that, after years of funding cuts, local schools have started to offer more arts at various levels of education.

“We know that if children are exposed to the arts early and often, they’re going to be arts lovers,” he said. “I think there’s a movement toward that.”

Delgado suggested that the arts could provide new stories and narratives for the city, to counter its reputation. “Who we are has been appropriated by the media, appropriated by the L.A. Times,” he said. “I think some of our stories are being re-appropriated through our arts and our music and our dance.”

Delgado said that, on a recent visit to Scotland, he’d encountered an arts festival in which corporations, bars, grocery stores, and other local businesses sponsored a local artist for a week; he’d like to bring the idea to San Bernardino. “Could you imagine if we asked some of our store owners?” he said.

During the question-and-answer session, audience members enthusiastically thanked those who had started the new arts center. And panelists and audience members exchanged ideas for how to get more funding for the arts—from foundations, businesses, real estate investors, and the city government as it emerges from bankruptcy.

One of the audience members, who identified himself as Cesar Gomez, asked, “Do we have any grant writers in the house?”

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Can the Arts Help Revive Our City?

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But most people don’t know that many of us who live and work in San Bernardino have been collaborating to revive interest in the arts—and rebuild our communities.

Maybe that sounds like just a nice thing to say. But it’s as real as the new San Bernardino Cultural Center we’ve created in the old Water Department building, a beautiful Spanish Revival structure constructed in the Depression that was supposed to have been torn down by now. Instead, we convinced the water district to lease it to us for $1 per year. Our local concert association, which was established in 1932, was the recipient of the building, and many arts groups and young people have been volunteering their time to fix up the place. It opens this Saturday, November 14.

This is hardly the only bit of good news. As the Los Angeles Newspaper Group wrote recently, we’re seeing our city in the midst of “a cultural awakening.” Among the highlights are a new public art project, “This is San Bernardino!” by the poet Juan Delgado and the photographer Thomas McGovern. It examines historical events in the city through exhibits in empty storefronts for people to view and comment on. The city has revived its Fine Arts Commission after several years of little activity, and the city—while still in bankruptcy court—has been doing more to support the arts, via grants, art walks, and festivals.

One of the costs of San Bernardino’s problems has been a loss in space for arts during recent economic hard times. There were no art galleries in town at all, and the arts offerings from California State University, San Bernardino—where I worked for many years, as a professor and dean of education—didn’t always reach beyond the campus. It was hard to watch as the city lost spaces for the visual and performing arts—classes and performance venues and exhibition halls—where people can make art together and share it.

But what’s great about cities is that they are places for connections. San Bernardino—the city I’ve lived in for 30 years and been around my whole life since I was born in Colton—is very much a great city, with more than 213,000 people. And it was clear that the city needed to re-create spaces where people could come together.

A few years ago, members of the Concert Association made a real effort to look around for places that might be used to showcase the arts. We fell in love with the old Water Department building at 11th and E Streets. Though it was old and vacant, we saw potential in its size and distinct spaces and look, with arcaded walkways, ornamental iron work, a red tile roof and thick walls constructed with adobe bricks.

Our community is diverse—ethnically (we’re 60 percent Latino)—and in our history and arts venues, from the Sturges Center for the Fine Arts to the National Orange Show Festival. The cultural center building is large enough, at 8,500 square feet, to accommodate a variety of art forms, in a variety of spaces—exhibit galleries, studios, workshops, rehearsal space, a community meeting room, an auditorium, a courtyard where people can gather. (In the future, we hope to have a glass-working studio.)

Refurbishing the building has taken many, many months, and the help of many people from all over the community. Retirees have contributed. So have volunteers from San Bernardino Generation Now, the Inland Empire Job Corps, and the Kiwanis. And visionary young people have been here every weekend. Many obstacles have been overcome (the electricity has been a challenge)—and now, musicians, painters, performers, and authors are ready to share.

I recently contacted teachers in San Bernardino, asking middle school and high school students to contribute artwork that responds to the query: “What I Like About San Bernardino.” You’ll be able to see the work in the center’s courtyard and colonnade during our opening.

To revive this city, we need new dreams, and the commitment and willingness to make those dreams a reality. People need a sense of belonging in San Bernardino, so that they will stay here, invest, and rebuild.

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I left the Central Valley to pursue higher education in the Bay Area and then Boston. My goal was to work in a museum as an educator; I wanted to see that spark of joy on the faces of children learning about beautiful works of art. That was an experience that had mattered to me as a child, and I knew it could, and should, matter to lots of kids.

But I thought then, as many of us do, that performing arts venues and museums were mostly located in big cities. I moved back to Turlock for the position as the city’s arts facilitator managing the Carnegie Arts Center, after more than 15 years of experience in some of those “big city” museums, to prove that’s not true. The greatest motivator for my decision was the potential for real impact. I craved direct involvement in the planning and implementation of programs for a community that I could connect with. Here in Turlock, I wanted to bring the arts alive through direct contact with patrons and neighbors.

In 2001, the year I returned to Turlock, there were relatively few resources for anyone with an interest in the arts. The university had a small art gallery and a theater for student and faculty shows. Most of those who attended exhibits and performances were already connected to the university. Town residents often expressed discomfort about attending university functions. In town, one framing shop showed the works of local artists, two music stores offered lessons, and two dance studios taught ballet and tap. In 1999, the old high school auditorium had been re-opened as a performing arts venue and attendance was building, but slowly.

Many kids in my hometown were already at an “arts disadvantage.” Their parents are less likely to be college-educated (only 16.4 percent of Stanislaus County residents over 25 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to a statewide rate of over 30 percent), and several studies have shown that education levels are one of the key factors in arts exposure. Exposure is more likely to lead to participation and enjoyment. Adults who didn’t have the good fortune to visit museums or see live theater in their youth may not pursue arts opportunities for their children. A two-hour drive to attend a museum, play, or concert in the city might not seem worth it.

So how could young people in Turlock, a town of 70,000 in a rural county, get exposure to the arts? How could we prevent them from feeling that the arts are just for rich or privileged people who live near museums and concert halls? These questions grabbed my attention.

My ambitions were initially small. Our art gallery was located in a 90-year-old former public library building, with no air conditioning or ADA-accessible facilities. Our staff was me, a part-time clerical assistant, and a handful of dedicated volunteers. Our funding from the city covered just salaries; donations paid for exhibitions of local artists and a sporadic program of poetry and theater.

At first, we had a hard time broadening our reach and making contact with new, young families. Everything I read said that a positive first experience was the most proven way of encouraging later attendance at arts events. So I initiated school field trips and expanded after-school and summer classes for kids. We raised funds for an accessible classroom, gallery, and restrooms. Those efforts literally went up in smoke when fire ravaged the historic structure in 2005. However, with community support and a forward-thinking city council, we rebuilt—and created something the community is incredibly proud of.

The Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock, California.

Constructed with funding from the city and now operated independently by the non-profit Carnegie Arts Center Foundation, the new facility includes two well-equipped art studios, a multi-purpose room that can serve as a rehearsal space for dance or theater, a black box theater, and a concert, film, and lecture venue. The Carnegie schedules educational and entertaining programs all year long while also partnering with other community organizations to present their events. Our museum-quality exhibition space draws “big city” shows: In 2011, we featured Ansel Adams; in 2012, Edgar Degas; and in 2013, Pablo Picasso.

Most important, the new gallery brings quality art experiences into the lives of students. More than 30 years after the passage of Proposition 13, which cut local tax revenues for California public schools and virtually eliminated arts programs, schools still struggle to find a budget for the arts. Studies in Santa Clara County and Los Angeles County within the past 10 years found that most local school districts allocated less than 2 percent of their annual spending to arts education. From 2004 to 2006, California had no dedicated source of state funding for arts education. Even with the adoption in 2001 of specific content standards in visual and performing arts, many schools struggle to provide arts programs or professional development. Many elementary school teachers have told me they feel unprepared in visual arts instruction.

At the Carnegie, we have spent four years building a program with schools in our city and within a 40-mile radius. Field trips are based not only on seeing the work of famous artists, but also on a hands-on studio component. Lessons of the gallery come to life as each child creates something of his or her own to take home. Our current exhibition features work of the Art Nouveau-era graphic artist Alphonse Mucha. In the gallery, students learn about how he created compositions advertising a variety of products. In the studio, docents talk about framing, symmetry, and use of text to promote and sell. The students then create their own advertising poster.

Fourth graders from Curtis Creek Elementary School in Sonora visited the “Ansel Adams: California” exhibition in 2011.

After just the first year of this new program, more schools requested opportunities to engage—and not just with exhibits of world-famous artists. In 2011, we began a partnership with the Ceres Unified School District. Each spring now, every Ceres fifth grader visits the Carnegie Arts Center to see the works of local and regional artists. We develop lessons around basic elements of art that teachers can build on after the visit. Since 2011, more than 10,000 students have come through our doors. And participation should only increase. With the support of local businesses and individuals, we are able to pay most, if not all, costs to allow schools to bring classes to our gallery. Teachers tell us again and again that they would not be able to teach their students about the arts without the resources we provide.

Other organizations in the region are also committed to exposing young people to the arts. The Gallo Center for the Arts, which opened in nearby Modesto in 2007, has built a similar education program for theater performance, and their funders support tickets and transportation for thousands of school children each year. The Central California Art Association recently began a program called CLASS—Community Liaison for Art in Stanislaus Schools—that puts experienced artists into elementary school classrooms. Arts access for children in the region is growing.

My goal is to make sure that the fourth and fifth graders visiting the Carnegie now feel like they are entitled to the arts. If they understand how the arts can enrich their lives, they will ensure that their children have that same advantage. As we continue to expand and develop arts in our region, there should come a time when no child in my community feels that the arts are out of reach.

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My job is to capture the moment when family members are reunited. As I see the uniforms approaching the glass doors leading toward us, I move slightly away and take a knee. I’ve already planned my shot: when a five-year-old boy rushes forward to grab his dad. It will be an emotional photograph. They’ve not seen each other in person for over a year.

I grew up in a family with a strong history of service in the military. My dad and my father-in-law served in the Air Force, and my stepfather served in the Army. To this day, my stepfather bears the physical scars of his encounters with Agent Orange. My family’s close ties to the armed services are hardly unusual where I come from—Clovis, a suburb of Fresno that sits right in the middle of California’s Central Valley. Fresno County includes the Naval Air Station Lemoore and the Fresno Air National Guard Base. Many people around here value and respect those in the military a great deal. As a teen, I wasn’t encouraged to pursue military service, and I chose not to. Still, I knew well the cost of the freedoms that we enjoy in this country. It pained me a little that I didn’t do my part.

Then I figured out how I could help: photography.

I run my own business, working with families on portraiture, as well as weddings and other special events. When I began five years ago, some of my clients were active-duty military families getting photos prior to deployment. It struck me how important a photograph could be for them. I remember how hard deployments could be: When I was 15, my brother-in-law at the time, an active-duty Marine, was sent to the Middle East as a fighter jet mechanic. My sister—and my nieces, in future deployments—were left behind. I know my sister worried, though she wouldn’t admit it. The rest of the family did too. Photographs can help with that worry. They offer a piece of togetherness to both the deployed family member and the ones remaining at home. They’re a reminder that you can touch and hold. You can even talk to a photograph when an actual conversation isn’t practical or possible.

So this became my service to those who serve. Two and a half years ago, I joined Operation: Love Reunited, or OpLove. OpLove provides professional photos to military families with members serving in distant locales. I work with families at both the Lemoore Naval Air Station and Fresno Air National Guard base. Like all my fellow OpLove photographers, I do this free of charge—no fees for mileage, parking, sessions, retouching, or studio time.

OpLove sessions come in three flavors: pre-deployment sessions, mid-deployment sessions, and homecoming sessions. The pre-deployment session and mid-deployment sessions are quite a bit like a family photography session. The major difference between the two is that in the mid-deployment session, our aim is to get great photos of the service member’s family to send overseas. In my all-time favorite OpLove session, a mid-deployment one, I worked to capture photos of a newborn girl whose dad had not met her yet. I was there for the birth of both of my children and cannot imagine what it must be like to get orders to deploy with a baby on the way. We wrapped the newborn in the fatigues of her grandfather and used the flag that shrouded his coffin in the background; I later heard that the photo moved dad to tears when he received it.

Finally, the homecoming sessions are lively and unpredictable. They are a convergence of two seas, family members waiting for a glimpse of their loved one and those returning from deployment waiting for their commander to release them. Once the seas meet, the resulting pandemonium can be really difficult for a photographer. In most cases, I’ve not seen the returning member before, or if I have, it was in a session from over a year ago.

I photograph the expectant faces of the spouses, children, or others who are awaiting the arrival. If you’ve watched faces of people as they wait for someone, you know that moment when they see who they’re searching for in the crowd—the sudden smile, the tears of joy, the seemingly involuntary jumping up and down. Then I photograph the reunion—hugs, crying, kisses, smiles, yells of “daddy” or “mommy.”

For some homecomings, I travel to the base and await the landing of a transport plane—in a hangar or out in the sun.

On this day, when I’m waiting at the airport for the five-year-old to greet his dad for the first time in a year, the homecoming is smaller than others I’ve been to, just a handful of service people returning. But that doesn’t mean the feelings are any less powerful. When I get that shot of the boy and his dad, hugging, I know that my camera and I are in the right place.

The post Finding the Beauty in a Service Member’s Return appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We also have struggles with crime, including in downtown. And despite many beautiful settings and venues there, it’s been hard to get people together in the center of the city. At 9 on many nights, downtown Stockton can feel like an empty wasteland.

I love Stockton—not only do I live here, but I grew up here and went to college here—and a few years ago, I decided I wanted to make a statement of that love. I wanted to convince people to take ownership of our city, and to change the image of downtown. So I decided to put together a musical event that would reclaim Stockton’s reputation. It’s called the Reclaim Concert.

I chose music because it’s the family business. My parents, Dumisani and Valerie Washington, who also were raised in Stockton, are the founders of a local music school called the Zion Academy of Music. My dad taught me piano, and I also studied at a conservatory in San Francisco before attending the University of Pacific here in Stockton and earning a degree in music composition.

After graduation, I thought about leaving and trying to write film scores, but I felt such a pull to stay here—in this community of musicians with whom I’d grown up—that I ended up teaching at our music school instead. Now I’m the director of the school, and lead local bands.

It was in 2012 that my business partner (and bass player and manager in my band) Alex Urbano and I decided to organize the Reclaim Concert. Soon many friendly musicians, teachers at the school, and students all stepped forward to be a part of it. A very young city councilman, Michael Tubbs, was crucial to making it happen. We wanted an accessible event, and decided to hold it at a beautiful waterfront setting, the Weber Point Event Center. It’s the perfect place for a free, outdoor concert—a huge park, with a playground that could handle thousands of people if necessary.

We had more than 600 people for the concert, with a live band (my own, called Current Personae), a 30-piece Reclaim Concert Orchestra, and some featured guest musicians from out of town, headlined by the Canadian singer-songwriter Joanna Borromeo, known for her fusion of R&B, jazz, gospel, and hip hop.

The concert took 10 months to plan and required strong volunteer work on stage management, hospitality, finances, and marketing, in addition to music. But it went so well that a year later, we organized a second concert, with artists including The Monticelli Trio (from New York-New Jersey) and Los Angeles-based vocalist Aubrey Logan. Teachers from Zion Academy were key members of the orchestra and band, and at this second concert, a few students played as well. I made a big point of getting students to be part of putting on the event in multiple ways. Young people in Stockton often can sound very negative about the town, and I’m hoping the concerts helped change their impression.

We paid for the concerts with crowdfunding and the support of many local partners, from the Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce and the University of the Pacific to local businesses Moo Moo’s Burger Barn, Chitiva’s Salsa and Sports, and KCM Boutique.

The events got a lot of press, and they have proven to be one of several positive developments that are changing the conversation around downtown. We’re seeing more musical gatherings, festivals and other events downtown, some put on by people who were part of the Reclaim Concerts. And that’s brought new restaurants and businesses downtown.

In fact, one of the businesses moving downtown now is my own: the Zion Academy. We hope to complete the move from our site in the north part of Stockton during the winter break. We’ve had to put our plans for more Reclaim Concerts on hold until the move is completed.

But once Zion is downtown, we intend to do more outdoor concerts, and in more places. I think DeCarli Square, also in downtown and near the water, has huge potential. It’s a space that can be open to all but provide a smaller, more intimate feeling. We also want to include more local musicians and students in future concerts, offer more of a mini-concert series, and conduct Zion Academy concerts and classes in public.

The goal is convince more and more Stocktonians to use their gifts and time to make Stockton a stronger community; that is the most crucial aspect to all of this.

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We are a mix of full-time and part-time professional artists, retirees, and hobbyists. Some of us have years of experience painting outside, while others have had their first experience painting “en plein air” with us. We work in oils, pastels, charcoal, pencil, acrylics, watercolor, and casein. Some of us have elaborate setups with easels, palettes, umbrellas, and chairs, and others just bring a sketchbook and a pencil. What we all have in common is that we have chosen to work en plein air—French for “in the open air”—instead of in the relative safety of a studio.

I started The High Desert Plein Air Artists in January 2014 for community and companionship. I had been plein air painting for a few years by myself, but I wanted to meet other plein air artists in the Morongo Basin. Today there are around 30 artists on our email list, some from as far away as Riverside. On any given Saturday, as many as eight people come out to paint together at a location I’ve chosen.

Creating art is often a solitary activity. When I head out to paint alone, it is a very introverted, meditative experience. I become immersed in the landscape, consumed by my thoughts, interpretations, and reactions. Painting with The High Desert Plein Air Artists is a social experience. We share ideas, talk about potential sites in the day’s area, view others’ interpretations of the same landscape, and have someone to chat with when we need a break. The group also forces me to get out at least once a month—it’s a sacred appointment on my calendar that I can’t miss.

Our gatherings—“paint outs”—look different depending on the time of year. The Mojave Desert weather can be anywhere from gorgeous to utterly unbearable—and those extremes can occur all on the same day.

During the winter, we start around 9 a.m. The artists usually spread out and find their own areas to create. One person will set her easel up to capture the light and shadow on some rock formations, another might be painting a vista scene of a desert expanse and mountains, and someone else might be focusing on a bush in bloom. Some people work in a tight, detailed manner, others are more impressionistic, and some create strongly abstracted pieces. One artist in our group does miniature works on a canvas no larger than 6-by-8 inches. Martha, a professional artist from Palm Springs, joined us last year. The first piece she did with us, a lush impasto oil painting, was accepted into the Joshua Tree National Park Art Exposition last November. Holly, a retired teacher, does colorful, beautifully textured pastels of mountain vistas.

If the weather is cooperating, we will meet up for lunch and share the results of our morning efforts. At that point, some artists will continue to paint, and others will head home. As temperatures rise in the spring, we start earlier. The winds also pick up later in the year. Mornings are apt to be calm, but the winds can really whip up as the day goes on; they have been known to dump easels to the ground and blow works on paper across the desert.

As we head into the summer months, only the true die-hards venture out. We have to start at first light, as close to 5:30 a.m. as possible. We usually only paint for a few hours, and don’t have any group time. By the time we are done painting at 7:30 or 8 a.m., it’s usually approaching 90 degrees, and all everyone wants to do is retreat to the air conditioning of their automobiles. The autumn months are the most unpredictable, with everything from gale force winds and chilling rain to blistering heat. Sometimes we are blessed with an absolutely perfect day, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Joshua Tree National Park covers 1,234 square miles, so we have many potential “studios” and subjects on any given day. I try to find spots with good parking, a restroom, and potential subjects that don’t require a lot of walking. The park is full of Joshua Trees, boulders, junipers, piñon pines, mountains, and more, and it even has a seasonal body of water at Barker Dam. I don’t know if it is possible to exhaust its possibilities. I’ve been plein air painting there for the last six years or so, and I still find new and exciting scenes every time I go.

On one occasion, I was struggling to find a spot to set up. A fellow artist mentioned how the light was hitting the cotton woods a little way down the path, so I headed over there and found my subject for the morning.

A session with The High Desert Plein Air Artists results in artworks that have immediacy, vibrancy, and energy that is difficult to achieve in a studio environment. Outdoors, we take in the subject matter with all our senses, and feel the camaraderie of facing the same challenges (and experiencing the same beauty) as a group.

But perhaps most importantly, The High Desert Plein Air Artists keeps me getting outside to paint and be inspired by the incredible desert beauty, and the incredible artists that join me to create and be inspired themselves.

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As an infant, I was found on the steps of a church. I was adopted, at 10 months old, by an American couple from San Francisco. When I was 26, I moved to Fresno to accept a tenure-track teaching position at Fresno City College. This year, I was named Poet Laureate of Fresno.

More than 90 languages are spoken in Fresno County, where the heat reaches 110 degrees in the summer, the fog in winter softly blankets Highway 99, and we farm 250-some kinds of crops. When I moved here in 1997, I learned about the pillars of Fresno poetry. I felt like I was part of something, and I was. It is a tough city full of grit, but amidst the heat and dust, hard working poets blossom. Here is where I learned to write.

The late Andrés Montoya was my first influence, and the largest. I met him through our mutual friend, author Daniel Chacón. Andrés died at age 31 before his first book, the ice worker sings and other poems, was published. He believed that poetry fueled personal, societal, and cultural liberation. He wrote about the downtrodden, the poor, the factory workers, and the drug-addicted. He beautified what some deemed ugly and taught me that poetry is for all the people around you. I saw what language could do. We talked for hours about poetry, politics, and race. I had found my first brother in poetry.

In Fresno, there are farmers’ markets every day of the week, and in Fresno, you can find poet laureates, and not just local laureates like me. Once I saw Philip Levine at a grocery store and introduced him to my daughter. In a career that saw him named United States poet laureate in 2011, Levine became known as a voice for the working-class, but he was more than that. My favorite of his books, The Simple Truth, taught me there is something extraordinary about ordinary people. I loved his ability to cut to the truth of a good poem or right through the pretension of a bad one, both as a legendary professor who spared no one the truth in his critiques, or in memorable lines of poetry, when he writes, “Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true, they must be said without elegance.” Before his death, in an interview with Bill Moyers, Levine stated that what angered him most was American racism and American capitalism. These were great models for me. I did not know him well, but when we spoke he was always kind to me. His poems and his life are true inspirations.

Juan Felipe Herrera, the current U.S. Poet Laureate and formerly California’s laureate, lives here, too. Once, years ago I saw him in Fresno’s Tower District when his collection Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler had just come out, and I had my copy in the car. I asked him to sign it right there on the street, which he did. Herrera’s playful musicality, his political fierceness, his humility, and his compassionate embrace of all people around the world are examples bar none. Juan Felipe has always been good to me, supportive of my work, and a friend in poetry. We are not close friends, but his poems are close to my heart. I count him as a friend and an important role model. I admire his tireless devotion to social justice through poetry. Much of my poetry and teaching life has been devoted to this, and I have Juan Felipe Herrera to thank for his example.

Two more Fresno poets and good friends shaped me early, and still do. First, Brian Turner served as an infantry team leader in the Iraq, and I met him when he returned home after the war. He was looking for a poetry community, and we found each other. We are good friends, and he always inspires me, with his poems, his kindness, and his humility. His books are about war, the many effects on people here and abroad, and the resilience of the human spirit. I value his calm in the midst of a storm, and Brian’s poems exude this, as well as a great fire of the spirit. He was raised here, and although he now lives in Florida, he is a Fresno poet to the core. I count Brian and the second poet, Tim Z. Hernandez, as dear friends.

I met Tim almost 20 years ago in Fresno. Tim is known for his gritty and beautiful novels, including his historical novel about Bea Franco, the “Mexican Girl” from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, but I knew him first from his early poems about manhood and Latino culture that would become Skin Tax. Tim is about hard work, community, and writing killer poems and novels. He shines a light on the small beauty in life to a world often afflicted with disinterest. He now lives in El Paso and teaches at UTEP, but he too is a Fresno poet through and through. Some poets leave after receiving tenure-track teaching jobs elsewhere, but I believe that poets who once lived here and leave always keeps a part of Fresno in their heart and in their poems.

It is an honor to serve as Poet Laureate of Fresno. I have mentioned poets who shaped my work most, but there are so many others—Connie Hales and Larry Levis, others who have advocated for young poets, poets produced by Fresno, students I have taught over the years. I wish I could name them all here.

Poetry is where fires begin and smolder. So it’s no wonder that poets here write killer poems in our unapologetic heat, the exhaust of the traffic, or the dream-inducing tule fog. It’s no wonder that I was born in South Korea, adopted to the U.S., and wound up in Fresno amidst factory workers, war veterans, and farm laborers. It’s no wonder that I learned to write and dream here. It’s no wonder that I love looking up at the stars.

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